wahlau's online hut

Having written yesterday on how one can be convinced to start trying using linux, and today byte wrote about his troubles with linux on notebook (mind you, byte is a FOSS hacker and guru) and showed a link from Watt Mossberg's recent review on Ubuntu with Dell machines. It makes me think, how can we justify whether is Linux ready for real use or not.

One of the kernel hacker, Con Kolivas, just announced quiting his contribution in improving kernel because he realised his effort to improve linux in the area of desktop usage is not taken into consideration. I realise Linux is today so big that it has many things to catch up. And when the big guys make decisions, some goodies might have to be set aside, eventhough it is important to some of the users.

This brought back to the topic here - desktop users, average joes, and also mobile users having linux notebooks. Are they being served? Are the decisions made for future developments going to benefit us, the normal users? I always admire how MacOS being able to "just work". Actually even many things in Linux today just work. Ok, it just work to a very basic extend. It gives me the impression that as long as it works, people are satisfied. In this sense, the developers also ensure things just work, but they stop at their own "just works". The consideration of just work can be also differnt from one person to the other. I might be happy to key in a few commands and things are still working for me, and i say this is just work, while for another person that is called "not working". The same feature might work for brand A or combination B, but as soon as you use brand C or combination D things stop working.

I believe to rule the world move forward, linux needs to make sure priorities are set according to the demand of the users, despite being the best or most all rounder. What is the point of being able to do everything, but not doing them well? There are still many points everyone is complaining on features one would love to have on desktop using linux, and they are not really space lab level requests - why are these not fully ready yet? As an example - to change display on a notebook from internal to external display - using linux it is not that easy to have the best solution for most cases. Why not? it beats me. What i am glad to hear is that the Xorg 7.3 and xrandr 1.3 (?) should have solved this issue... let's see.

I would not be so sure that linux is ready for average users, but i think it is close to it. With OpenSuSe, Ubuntu and other user-friendlier distributions around, the migration and convert processes are made easier. We only hope that developers also put their focus and effort on getting desktop and usability related stuffs - so that it is ready for you and i to get things done, without much hacks and CLI.